A small patch has been released for Penumbra: Requiem, you can get it here. The patch will improve performance in some levels as well as correcting various minor errors, for slightly more details see the support article.

Mac & Linux users can look forward to a release as soon as possible, the game is in the process of being ported. More news on this as the ports near completion.

About Penumbra: Requiem

"Penumbra: Requiem is an expansion for the horror game Penumbra: Black Plague and takes off where the last game ended. Requiem sees Philip, the game protagonist, falling deeper into madness and has to fight inner demons as well as outer ones.

Penumbra: Requiem is to be considered an epilogue to Penumbra: Black Plague and not as a new episode in the Penumbra series. The main goal with Penumbra: Requiem has been to focus more on the physics puzzles and to see how far the current game engine could be pushed. This has made Requiem into a game that focuses more on gameplay and puzzles than the previous Penumbra instalments and a game that is more experimental in nature.

Although having a strong emphasis on puzzles the game still features a dense atmosphere, a trade mark of the Penumbra series. In Penumbra: Overture the goal was to induce strong fears from isolation, in Black Plague a main theme was paranoia and in Requiem you'll find a nightmarish and feverish atmosphere.

Penumbra: Requiem is an attempt to deliver a fresh and rewarding experience and not just some rehash of previous material."

As the release of Penumbra: Requiem for Windows is very close we have had the time to put up the website for the game. The site can be found at www.PenumbraRequiem.com. Also, Linux and Mac users should not feel left behind! Versions for these system are in the works and will be available quite soon.

We would also take the opportunity to give our thoughts on the expansion and this text from the site sums it up pretty neatly:

"Penumbra: Requiem is an expansion to Penumbra: Black Plague and is to be considered an epilogue to that game and not as a new episode in the Penumbra franchise. The main goal with Penumbra: Requiem has been to focus more on the physics puzzles and see how far the current engine could be taken. This has made Requiem into a game that focuses more on gameplay and puzzles than the previous Penumbra instalments and a game that is more experimental in nature.

Although having a strong emphasis on puzzles the game still features a dense atmosphere, a trade mark of the Penumbra series. In Overture the goal was to induce strong fears from isolation, in Black Plague a main theme was paranoia and Requiem does its best to deliver a nightmarish and feverish atmosphere. Penumbra: Requiem is an attempt to deliver a fresh and rewarding experience and not just some rehash of previous material."

We have put a lot of work into Requiem and we believe it is the most polished of all of the Penumbra releases. The multitude of puzzles with multiple solutions is something that we are very proud of and we have gone to great length to ensure smooth gameplay. We really hope that you will enjoy this expansion and have good time with it.

We got kicked off our old server for "consuming" too much server power. After a couple of hectic days we now have the company, forum and support pages back, it's a good thing we already had a new dedicated server up and running!

We are now running all our sites from it, we had not planned to move all the sites already but, well, we had no choice any longer. As we had to move quickly some things might be broken, new, strange and odd, we might get the time to fix things up a bit more later. But for now this will do and we are now resuming our regular game development jobs.

Penumbra: Black Plague for Mac OS X & Linux released!
Regardless of your computer platform of choice it is now possible to enjoy the full Penumbra: Black Plague experience. Following up on the release of the demo two weeks ago the full versions are now available for $19.99 and can be obtained from http://www.penumbrablackplague.com/site/buy.php.

If you have not played the prequel, Penumbra: Overture, we would recommend it before trying Black Plague. Of course Overture is available for Mac & Linux and can be found at http://www.penumbra-overture.com.

A look into the past released
To all dear Windows users,

Before creating Penumbra and before founding Frictional Games, Thomas Grip worked on a game called Unbirth, unfortunately this game was never finished due to various issues. Unbirth was a game much like Penumbra, a first person real-time rendered adventure horror game, but without the nifty physics. During the past two years, players of Penumbra has continually asked if it would be possible to release any working code of the game, and well, Thomas decided that it actually is possible!

An alpha version of the game is now released at http://unbirth.frictionalgames.com as well as a short presentation about the game, how it was made and why it was, sadly, never finished. It is an unstable, but working demonstration and gives an insight into the history of the ideas and design choices that was an inspirational source in the creation of Penumbra.